With Xtrim’s acquisition, Evenflow aims to create a strong and affordable home-grown brand not only for Indian consumers but also something that appeals to the international audience.
Continuing with its vision to acquire home-grown online brands and help them scale-up, Evenflow Brands has made its third acquisition in a month with Xtrim, a four-year-old e-commerce digital-first brand in sports and fitness accessories.
Founded by former Uber executives Utsav Agarwal & Pulkit Chhabra in 2021, Evenflow aggregates third-party sellers on e-commerce platforms like Flipkart and Amazon. It acquires online marketplace sellers in the range of $200k – $1.5 mn per brand.
Xtrim is Evenflow’s third acquisition within three weeks after baby brand BabyPro and Rusabl, an online brand in the daily sustainables category.
Founded by Asghar Ali and Sathish Kumar in 2016, Xtrim sells sports, fitness, and outdoor accessories such as gym gloves, joint wraps, belts, amongst others. Xtrim also has a manufacturing unit, which is not a part of the acquisition deal.
Sports retail is a highly underpenetrated market in India, growing at an annual CAGR of 12%, and the customer penetration is expected to reach ~20% in the next three years. The segment is highly unorganized, with very few Indian brands selling at affordable prices, while premium global brands dominate the organized sports retail market.
With Xtrim’s acquisition, Evenflow aims to create a strong and affordable home-grown brand not only for Indian consumers but also something that appeals to the international audience.
Talking about the acquisition, Evenflow’s co-founder & VP Acquisitions, Pulkit Chhabra said, “The Sports and Fitness category has witnessed massive growth as people become more health-conscious and working-out-from-home is becoming the new normal. Xtrim being our first acquisition in the Sports & Fitness category, we’re excited about providing customers with premium quality fitness products at competitive prices.”
“Xtrim is a fabulous addition to our portfolio. We have the vision of building this into a top sports and fitness accessories brand on e-commerce, cutting across marketplaces, and launching new products with innovation targeted at the Indian consumer,” says Utsav Agarwal, co-founder & CEO.
Evenflow has acquired Xtrim at an upfront amount basis EBITDA multiple valuations and performance earnouts spread over three years.
Xtrim’s founders, Ashgar and Sathish, in a joint statement, said, “The idea behind the brand Xtrim is to offer world-class fitness products that are essentially ‘Made in India’ and compete with the best in the world. During our discussions with Evenflow, we found a lot of synergies like our strengths in manufacturing coupled with Evenflow’s expertise in the e-commerce space and expect to leverage those to realize the full potential of Xtrim. We as founders of Xtrim believe our partnership with Evenflow will help us in achieving our goal of taking our brand to the world.”
Evenflow expects Xtrim to be in India’s top-selling Indian sportswear brand with a 20x growth over the next 3-4 years. By 2022, it expects the brand to grow by 5x.
Unlike other Thrasio- style rollups focusing on D2C brands, Evenflow is heavily focused on third-party sellers on marketplaces and acquires them at EBITDA multiples, not revenue multiples. Evenflow has been acquiring third-party e-commerce sellers with attractive product portfolios and aims to establish them as solid brands across multiple categories in e-commerce.
The sheer width of sellers across different categories is massive and is only growing year on year. In 2020, over 700,000 sellers signed up on Amazon India, making it the highest among any Amazon marketplace globally. Also, globally, third-party sellers on Amazon crossed $300 bn in GMV & are expected to reach $650 bn in GMV by 2025. While they have good product portfolios, they do not have the expertise and capital to scale, where e-commerce aggregators become enablers.
Source: Business World
